19th Century American Literature: Revolution Now & Forever: Literature of the Revolutionary and Early National Era--Writing Intensive

2026 is the 250th anniversary of the founding of our nation.  It seems like a perfect time to revisit the literature of this era, to understand where we started and how the issues and concerns of the early years of our nation continue to resonate today.

How much freedom is too much? How big should our government be? How does a nation founded in revolution stop more revolutions or should it continue to be revolutionary? Are we a nation founded on the principle of equal rights for all, or does our history of racial injustice throw doubt on such ideals? Many Americans living today ask the same questions that our forebearers did 250 years ago.

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…”:The familiar opening lines of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, with its resonant words and calm tone, depicts revolution and new nationhood as both rational and inevitable. But there was nothing inevitable about the American Revolution and if the new nation was theoretically founded on rational principles, its actual development was far more messy, full of internal conflicts and fears for what the future held.

Although this period is often characterized by carefully crafted political documents like the Declaration and the Federalist Papers, any real assessment of it must also include other writings, including the more heated political rhetoric of Thomas Paine and the Anti-Federalists, but also the outpouring of poetry, fiction, and drama that met the rise of the new nation.

The fiction perhaps most accurately represents the complexity of forces shaping the new nation, with popular seduction novels that allegorized the new nation as a ‘giddy young girl’ seduced by new freedoms that democracy offered, and gothic novels, which suggested that there was a dark undercurrent to the nation, both in its history of mistreatment of Black and Indigenous peoples and its origin in revolutionary violence. Add in rollicking comedic plays and novels about post-Revolutionary America, along with poetry that sought to capture the spirit of the new nation, and you have a literary landscape that captures the complexity of living in a new nation seeking to articulate its values and beliefs from scratch.

We’ll explore this literature together, bringing a literary sensibility to some of the familiar political documents of the Revolutionary era, but also bringing political concerns to poetry, fiction, and plays of the period. We’ll also consider how the questions asked by these texts about the new nation remain relevant today.

This is a Writing Intensive class, which means that in addition to a series of short writing assignments spread out over the term, we will conclude with a final project that adds research, revises, and expands an earlier essay. The short writing assignments range across a variety of essayistic modes, from close literary analysis, to placing a text in its historical context, to personal reflection, and creative response to a text.

Although this is an upper-level English class, it is also appropriate for History, Political Science, and Constitutional Democracy students.